Volunteering

Not only can you join us on regular guided walks and underground trips around the lead mining areas of the Peak District, but also there are opportunities to learn new skills or share your skills with others.

Getting involved is a great way to meet other people with interests in industrial archaeology, geology, social history and many other areas of relevance to the mining industry in particular, and the Peak District in general.

There are a wide range of projects and activities that you might like to help out with:

MATERIAL FOR PUBLICATIONS

The editors of the prestigious twice yearly bulletin Mining History and the quarterly newsletter are always happy to receive more contributions. We welcome short articles and news items for the newsletter and website, and more detailed and authoritative articles for Mining History.

Richard, the editor of Mining History, will consider all manuscripts for publication that fall in the broad mining field, especially those on the Peak District and surrounding area. He can be contacted at editor@pdmhs.com. Guidelines for submissions to Mining History can be found here.

CONTENT FOR THE WEBSITE As part of our efforts to keep the PDMHS website fresh and up-to-date, we are always looking to include relevant content from our members. Obviously we have to exercise “editorial control” so your submissions are not automatically added and where they are there is a strong possibility that we will edit them.

PhotosPictures that include people work best, adding scale and a human dimension. Suitable subjects include PDMHS projects, heritage walks, underground trips or general views of lead mining scenery.
Any photos we choose to add will be credited. Please provide caption information (date, locations, people, description as appropriate). The preferred format is JPEG, if you know how to resize them, they only need to measure 1000 pixels on the longest side. If you don’t know how to resize them, just send them as they are and we can do it for you. To give you an idea of the sort of thing we’re after, here’s a photo taken on one of our recent heritage walks in Lathkill Dale. We are happy to select from a small gallery of your photos but please don’t swamp us with dozens.
Please send your photos to meets@pdmhs.com

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Writing for the web is a very different undertaking than for other media. Articles need to be short and to the point or they just don’t get read but it’s not just that. Billions of other web pages are just one click away, one poor experience is enough to make a visitor to our site move on somewhere else on the web.
A secondary but still vital consideration for the webmaster is the impact on how Google indexes the PDMHS web site, we risk being heavily penalised for getting it wrong. It is important that we appear in the first few pages of results for relevant searches and that is very difficult to achive.
There is also an issue in respect of consistency of style. Big commercial websites publish detailed and extensive “style guides” for their content providers. Smaller sites like this rely instead on editors who aim to achieve much the same, removing the need for individual content providers to worry about conforming to the standards of the site.
There is a very high likelihood that the webmaster will make significant changes to your submission, if you prefer that should not happen then we will be unable to accept your article. Articles for consideration should be sent to webmaster@pdmhs.com.

These are a good introduction to the Society for new members, and we need knowledgeable guides who are able to lead walks to sites of historical, archaeological or geological interest. Walks are held on weekday evenings in summer, and longer walks take place at weekends throughout the year.

If you have specialist knowledge of some part of the area you are most welcome to lead a walk.

For reasons of safety and insurance these are members only events. Trips vary in difficulty and the equipment required. Members with caving or climbing experience (as well as knowledge of the mines to be visited) are needed to lead visits.

This large site is iconic of the Peak District Lead Mining industry, and you can’t have failed to see photos of it. Magpie is a popular visitor attraction and has the distinction of being classified as a Scheduled Monument.

There are numerous tasks – many of which demand no special skills – and any help you are able to offer is gratefully accepted. Opportunities include cutting grass, weeds and brush, sourcing, storing and preparing firewood, cleaning and painting, raking out and re-pointing mortared walls and rebuilding dry-stone walls.

Heritage Open Day is an annual September event that we need to spruce the place up for beforehand. We also need car park attendants, tour guides, refreshments servers and people to help tidy up afterwards.

At other times during the year when we are on site, we try to chat with visitors to find out what motivated them to visit, where they come from, how they heard about us – and to sell the guide booklet which summarises the mine.

There’s always plenty to do and a wide variety of skills needed at the Magpie Mine site, contact Mave at magpiebookings@pdmhs.com

The society recently acquired the collections of Doug Nash and the late Nellie Kirkham (early industrial archaeologists) which had to be put into storage at short notice. Thousands of documents, photographs and plans now need sorting and cataloguing.

There is a small scale mining display along the vintage tram route in Crich Tramway Village and a mineral gift shop. We need help maintaining equipment and displays and staffing the shop – especially at weekends.

We have acquired the former steam winder from Long Rake Mine. This is now situated at Temple Mine and needs cleaning, housing, and preparing for public display. A team leader is currently needed for this this project.

Latest news and events

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COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Except where otherwise indicated, all text and images on this site are the copyright of the Peak District Mines Historical Society and no copying is allowed.
To the best of our knowledge all materials on this web site are used with the originator's permission. Should that not be the case, please let us know and the item will be removed. All rights reserved.